A half-baked and sometimes-disturbing tale.
Meyers (Another’s Fool, 2017, etc.) offers a Western about a 12-year-old who assists his uncles in the capture of an infamous thief.
In 1922, young Bing is the nephew of a sheriff and his deputy in Wilbarger County, Texas. As such, he doesn’t spend his days in school. Instead, his Uncle Jim and Uncle Rube let him tag along on important missions, including collecting prisoners off the local train and locking them up in town. One day, Frank Holloway—the notorious “Oklahoma Yeggman” (the latter term a slang word for “safe-cracker”)—comes to town in chains. He was recently caught for pickpocketing in Chicago, and many people consider him to be a shadow of his former glory. But Uncle Jim believes that the yeggman is as mischievous as ever, and he encourages Bing to treat him as a highly skilled criminal. After Holloway pleads not guilty and gets released until his next court hearing, he ends up robbing the local bank, and Bing joins Jim and Rube as they try to beat him to the Mexican border. The yeggman’s crimes bring to mind those in The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) and The Sting (1973). As Bing tracks the convict, he observes how the Wild West is disappearing, only to make way for new crimes and punishments. In this way, Meyers effectively shows how the era of the Old West met the Victorian Age. In general, however, the book would have been clearer if it had simply used more pronouns; the author’s style of dialogue often lacks them, resulting in half-formed thoughts and cryptic details: “Going home tomorrow. Won’t stay here, you can bet on that!” Also, the book repeatedly and uncomfortably suggests that older adults find the 12-year-old protagonist to be sexually attractive. For instance, one of Uncle Jim’s friends looks at Bing and comments, “How lips—so ruby red!—impress one as wishing to be pressed with one’s own.”
A half-baked and sometimes-disturbing tale.Pub Date: June 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63263-870-0
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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